Arts practice as method, urban spaces and intra-active faiths

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the research design for an arts-based interfaith research project that is intended to build relationships between children from different faiths and to increase research participants’ understandings of faiths other than their own. The project is funded as an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship called Early Start Arts to Counter Radicalization and has a mixed method approach that brings arts-based workshop groups for children together with focus groups for parents. Early findings demonstrate the utility of art for developing a sense of belonging and self-worth in children and clearly show ways in which art facilitates comment on complex social issues even from primary school age. The nature of such socially engaged arts-based research means it must be developed or, at the least, refined, through engagement with community and social context. As such, consideration of the urban environment that shapes the lives of the young research participants and their families forms part of the discussion undertaken.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts-based methods
• youth
• urban multiculturalism
• Counter-Terrorism
• Prevent
• public policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Professor A. C. Hickey-Moody is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University. She also holds visiting appointments at Goldsmiths, University of London in the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Manchester Metropolitan University in Arts and Humanities and the Education and Social Research Institute and The University of Sydney in Gender and Cultural Studies. Anna is a member of the international management committee for the New Materialism action COST IS1307 on How Matter Comes to Matter, working specifically with Creative Arts Working Group 3. Anna is known primarily for her theoretically informed empirical work with socially marginalised young people and also for her critical engagements with masculinities.

Notes

1 The focus groups run for 90 minutes and are held the week after the arts workshops finish.

2 Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

3 The area was initially colonized with the ironic title ‘Liberty Plains’, a farming area. In 1892, Auburn was proclaimed as an independent borough, and the neighbouring area of Silverwater was amalgamated with Auburn in 1906 to create a larger council area. In 1949, the Municipalities of Auburn and Lidcombe were amalgamated to form the new Auburn Municipality. In 1993, Australian law changed and municipality ceased to be a legal category of local government area. Auburn Municipal Council became ‘Auburn Council’, and the same name was used to refer to the former Municipality of Auburn. A project by Auburn Council to seek city status began in 2006 and in 2009, the Governor of NSW issued a proclamation granting Auburn city status.

4 Speaking about his (then) fellow councilors, after they chose not to approve his application for a large build, Mehajer stated that: ‘I’d like to remind the two of you “dole bludgers” that it is I, and indeed people like myself that is [sic] paying for that slice of bread and capsule of butter sitting on your kitchen bench’. ‘Both of you seem to always hold such negative ideologies and have set “anti-development” ideals, yet [sic] when it comes to me or someone with an “olive complexion” lodging a development application, I/we are grossly targeted’ (Mehajer in ABC Online 2016). Such derogatory statements about ‘dole bludgers’ made by someone with an ‘olive complexion’ shows us the self-identifying deviant from Cohen’s spiral of deviance, the ‘folk devil’ who has been taught so often that they are deviant that they come to believe and to perform deviance.

5 Bourriaud has been substantively critiqued for positioning artists as being more powerful than their audiences and the participants in relational artworks.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [FT160100293].